Julia Gaffield, Associate Professor of History at William & Mary, through AVENGED AMERICA … JEAN JACQUES DESSALINES and Haiti's Fight for Freedom, 340 pages, published by Yale University Press, has done more than present “a moving and human portrait of the abolitionist revolutionary,” Haiti’s first head of state, of the world’s first Black republic. Through “new and in-depth” research, her book takes aim at a historiography that has caricatured Dessalines as a “barbarian.”

This caricature is not based on facts but on the fears of slaveholders of the time, argues the 14-chapter work, which surveys the life of Dessalines—“that troublesome slave”—his military career, his relationships with Toussaint and Christophe…, his military victories, his diplomatic shrewdness, and his deeply held convictions as a man marked by the irons of slavery and a convinced abolitionist.